From Courses to Cash: How Fathom AI Turns Customer Education into Revenue

Awesome, thank you. Yes, I'm a new chicken mom, which has been a fun journey to say the least, but that's not why I'm here. Funny that they say to turn off all your note takers. If it's Fathom, leave it on, it's okay.

But thank you. As you said, I'm Michelle Dizon. I have the honor of leading what we call scale success at Fathom, as well as customer education. In my past life before this fun adventure in AI, I worked for PagerDuty and I ran customer education there.

We built what was PagerDuty University at the time, and it's still around obviously. So I was a Skillshare customer, very early one. Actually, Dina and I were just talking about that. I have actually been building some form of training and education since Articulate was a plug-in to PowerPoint.

So that ages me a little bit. Thank you for nodding your head. But for a very, very long time. I have been in this world of what is the best way for adults to learn in technology, in adult education for quite a while.

I was saying to a couple of the Gainsight folks here that being here has been really validating. It's been really nice to be like, "Yes, we've made it." People are understanding where customer education fits in. I've heard a lot of things. In the first day keynote, I heard Ed and Chuck say the word context is key.

Context is the word to focus on. You'll see it a lot in my talk too. Again, another validation on what we're learning here. I have a poll up here.

Don't answer it. Answer it. But it might guide my conversation a little bit more. I tend to wing some of the slides once in a while if I see some of this.

But it looks like where people are in their customer journey. So a lot of people have a full offering. Amazing. Also means that you're at this point where you're like, "Is this the right offering?

Is this the thing we're supposed to do? Are we going to change this?" Some people, you have an offer, but not really a strategy around it. I know what that feels like. Some people have a knowledge base and a lot of support tickets.

Yeah, I've been in all those places. So awesome. That might just change how we talk about things here. All right.

Let's kick it off. I promise I have slides. There we go. Let's start it off with some quotes here.

So the first one is, "Fathom is an incredible tool, but it doesn't sink information to my CRM. So we've decided to cancel." It is an incredible tool by the way. Wow. I had no idea that Fathom did that.

So at first glance, the second one is awesome. Yes, they're learning something new. The first one is not so great. But to be fair, I think both of them are bad.

Early on when I started, we heard this second one all the time. I joked with my manager that, "I just don't want to hear that anymore." My goal is to get to a place where no one is surprised by what Fathom is doing. They're already aware of these things. We do sink information to your CRM by the way.

So the fact that they're calling that out in a conversation with us and churning another red flag, another thing that we really should have been able to get ahead of. So although there's no problem at Fathom, we really are product-led growth. We're easy to use. We are plug and play.

The biggest issue wasn't our pipeline. Clearly, it's doing well. It's not our pricing. We're probably one of the cheapest on the market.

It's definitely not our product. You're probably saying the same things. People come to us for our product. They pay for it because it's the right price point.

The biggest problem that I was facing was that it's the customers didn't quite understand the double-click of Fathom. So in my example, every time a customer says, "We didn't know Fathom could do that," they didn't understand. There was some knowledge gap from when they bought to where we are right now. It looks like most of us have already gone through this shift, but customer education isn't support anymore.

It is becoming strategy. You've heard that time and time again this week. It is a part of the entire customer journey. The old world was legitimately docs, webinars, e-learnings, content, content, content, content, and costly reactive support.

Every time there's an issue, we roll out something new, there's a support influx, more support tickets, more support people, that type of thing. It's a cost center, not looked at great by your company, not looked at great by your board, whatever it is by you. It's a cost center. The new world, as we've all heard this whole week, is scalable education, one to many solutions.

It becomes a revenue engine. It is a growth driver. Where does this fit when we're driving revenue? So I'm gonna make a statement.

Most education programs still aren't driving revenue. So we aren't asking the right questions, right? We're asking what content we should create rather than what behavior are we trying to change. I don't know if anyone else was in the LinkedIn, the, sorry, the Asana chat, but it's the same thing, right?

We're trying to change the behavior of our customers and not necessarily throw more content at them. So let's talk about adoption and time to value. This is what's really important, right? This is like the first step in the journey.

I believe, oops, sorry, I believe that scalable education is the fastest way to accelerate adoption and time to value. I'm not saying we don't need our CSMs or our CSEs or TAMs or AEs or TSEs or whatever they are. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that if you build a scalable offering, it is going to increase, that decrease the time to value for your customers and bring to you a faster ROI.

So as we talk through this, the next couple slides of this and the entire sort of like learning journey that I've gone through, in my mind, when I'm making decisions, I'm always thinking about three things. I'm always thinking about revenue, cost and risk. So I'm thinking about how am I gonna drive revenue either for myself or my customers? How am I gonna increase, lower costs or lower risk?

Again, either for my company or for my customers' companies. So most companies are losing the game early and clearly Fathom was in that spot too, right? If people were saying, we didn't know Fathom did that, we were losing them early in the game. So it's not that your product is bad.

I mean, maybe it is, but then you're probably in the wrong talk. It's that you're giving your customers cognitive overload. And so when that happens, you're like, oh, we had an increase of support tickets, what should we do? Let's roll out another e-learning.

Let's put more content on the knowledge base. Let's answer the question that they're asking right in this moment. But we're not actually looking into what the customer actually needs. So if your product is simple, like ours is, you can't just solve this by tossing more stuff at them.

I'm gonna ask you a question. There's not many of you here, so go ahead and raise your hand. If I asked you, if I put you in a library right now, all the books in the world, every book, every language, whatever you want, I put you in a library and I said, can you answer this question for me? Do you think you'd be able to?

Raise your hand if you think you could. What is the earliest recorded joke in history? Would you know where to start? You're in a library with every book ever written.

And I asked you a really simple question. Don't pull out your phones because you don't need to know the answer. The point is, is that you're there with all of the content that you might need to answer that question. But you're gonna go one way.

You're gonna open five or six books and give up. You're gonna go down a different path, right? You're all gonna go a different way about it. Do you think you're gonna get frustrated?

Because it's not, you're not like answering a question that you know how to answer. You're answering a question that needs a little bit of context around it to help guide you in the right direction. But if I just chucked you in there, you wouldn't know where to start. And more likely than not, like in our product, if you have to double, triple click on something to figure out what you're trying to do, your customer's gonna throw their hands up.

And that's a little bit of the situation that Fathom was in. So we rolled out my shell. This is my avatar. It's built on a tool called Saltfish.

Saltfish is an onboarding tool that we use in the app. I will talk a little bit more about some more tools that I've come across later on. But what we wanted to do was we wanted to deliver onboarding in the moment that the user needed it, triggered by an action or an inactivity. So the exact lesson at the exact moment for the exact problem.

So Fathom, you're allowed to customize your templates, right? So you do a call recording. You want it to say a certain thing when you read it back. And so in Fathom, we were noticing that not a lot of people were customizing their templates, which is a hugely valuable part of our tool, right?

If you're a doctor or a consultant and you're recording your calls, you probably have specific things that you wanna learn about after you've recorded those calls. But if you're not customizing your template, we're giving you a spiced form for you to see a template that may not fit for you. So what we did is we created my shell and we rolled it out. And what the user had to do was they had to go through about 75% of this playlist and then click on that customize icon in Fathom.

And we did see a lot of people drop off, right? I pop up, they're like, "Please go away. I don't want you here." That's fine. But the people that did start it, we saw about 75% of them get to the point where they clicked on that gear icon.

That's wild. That means that we met them where they were in that moment, triggered by the fact that they hadn't yet clicked on it. And then they went ahead and they did it. They did something.

Now, interestingly enough, we're also able to see in that journey, there was a huge drop off when they clicked on that gear icon. We thought, "Oh no, it's not working." They click on the gear icon and it breaks it. That wasn't the case. They clicked on the gear icon and then they started playing with the tool.

They started playing with Fathom in a way that they hadn't before because they didn't even know to do that. So we met them where they were, introduced something to them. The way that Saltfish works, lots of tools like this, but the way that Saltfish works is it's triggered, right? So I triggered it based on where the customer was in their journey, the product that they had purchased and whether or not they had done something.

And I also don't pop up repeatedly, right? So once they've seen the video, I'm not like, "Hey, you wanna see it again?" So they're like, "No, I've already done that. Thank you. I played with the button." We also did this on our pricing page.

And we noticed on the pricing page that there was a 14% increase in CTAs where this avatar was there walking people through the pricing versus not, right? So we did an A-B test. We made sure it worked, but meeting the customer where they are, it's not a training example, but it definitely played it. So the next important thing obviously is retention, expansion, and error.

So now we're getting into the meat of the revenue, right? How are we actually going to measure that we're driving change and driving revenue? So there's a simple chain in every SaaS business, right? We should all know it.

It moves from understanding through to expansion, right? And I sort of think of it as a cycle, but you can think of it as a line. It doesn't matter. If any one of these pieces is taken out or it breaks, you're leaking revenue, period.

So the customer comes to you because they understand your product. I need a call recording technology, super. They use your product. It records their call, great.

They see the value, right? So what if they don't? Wow, I didn't know Fathom did that. Are they seeing the value?

Maybe, maybe not. If they aren't getting to the things that we want them to see beyond just our core technology or our simplest portion of the technology, they're probably not seeing value. Are they going to renew? If they're a paying customer and they aren't seeing value, they're probably not going to renew.

And if they do renew, but they weren't sure about the value, they're definitely not going to expand. Now we acquired a new company. We rolled something new out. Great new technology, AI this, AI that.

Aren't you guys going to love it? Well, if we didn't see it the first time, probably not. But if you can roll that new product out and then they understand it, they use it, they see value, then you are going to see where this is a faster ROI and really, really lends itself to that growth engine driving revenue. One thing we did when I first started was we noticed that our scale business, because I own both scale and customer education, our scale business really wasn't getting a whole lot of onboarding love.

That's the way of the world. We understand that, right? And so what we did is we rolled out webinars right away. And we use a tool called Get Contrast, which is actually how we were introduced to Saltfish.

And we pump all of the data from that tool, as well as all of the data from Saltfish into HubSpot. So we have a single source of truth. Replace HubSpot with Salesforce, whatever CRM you is, it doesn't really matter. We started doing them monthly.

We had huge attendance rates. We started doing them weekly, then twice weekly. We're running them daily, daily webinars. Now we have a lot of small individual users.

Our use case is slightly different. I can't say that a daily webinar is for every company. We're seeing about a 30% registrant to attendee rate on these webinars every single day. Which for anyone who's run webinars, seeing that consistently day in, day in, and out is pretty great.

Now, some days there's seven people in the room, right? That's seven scale customers that we otherwise would not have talked to. And yes, they can go and watch the recording afterwards. That's fine.

There's something about sitting in a room with the customer and answering their live questions that is driving change in our organization. We have been able to map from both Saltfish and from our contrast an increase in our ARR. We're able to map that back because of the metrics we're pumping into HubSpot. We can see that if a customer comes through Saltfish, what happens three months later?

What happens six months later? So we're using that data to really make sure that when I go back and say I need a new tool or I need another body or I need whatever it is, I'm tying what we're doing to revenue. So I wanna talk about the alignment framework. And I've heard a lot about this this whole week.

So I apologize if this is a little bit of what you've already heard already. But I think it's really important that internally you do have alignment across your organization. One of the mistakes that we made when I was at PagerDuty was the inability to have cross collaboration right out of the gate. We built siloed teams for all these different functions.

And then once we realized that they shouldn't be siloed, we were almost too far down that road. My colleague, Alyssa and I just did a talk, a support-driven conference in LA. And we talked about our two teams. And so Alyssa is our VP of support, so she owns all of the support experience.

And we talked about moving from this learning function to a maturing and then an optimizing. And so when you're in the learning phase, again, we're seeing those tickets, reactive tickets, lots of support tickets, one-off trainings, one-off ad hoc type of building of educational resources. And then leaning into maturing, which is I think sort of where my team is right now, you're starting to see themes emerge, right? You're starting to understand the context.

You're starting to build a framework for proactive education. You're seeing swim lanes. Oh, support does this. CS does this.

Sales does this. Education does this. And then in the optimizing phase, it's more self-service, right? People know where to go for what information.

There's specific needs and it's contextual. I think this alignment framework works across the entire organization. So I'm gonna use Fathom as an example here of what we do with our own tool. We drink our champagne, eat our dog food, whatever silly you wanna, silly saying you wanna say.

But I'm gonna talk about how we use our tool to do these things. You can use whatever tools you already have or you can buy Fathom. It's completely up to you. So in an alignment framework, what you wanna do is make sure all of those signals from all of your customers are captured, right?

They're everywhere. Your product team is probably testing out your product and they have a signal. They might be talking to people. That's another signal.

Your CSMs, your support organization, everyone in your organization can capture it. We use Fathom. We capture all of our calls, internal, external. And that's how we make sure that all of that information is captured.

How do you analyze that? There are plenty of tools out there that'll analyze that for you. Gain site is clearly one of them. What they've talked about this week is incredible, right?

To bring that, to translate it and to activate it. We use Fathom. We can ask Fathom whatever we want about sentiment. We can ask Fathom what happened on the call, what we should do next.

What are the things that need to happen as a result of this call? And then we translate it. So one thing that's really cool that we do with Fathom is that we have a channel in our Slack called Boom. The channel is the good channel, right?

When customer has a positive sentiment, says positive things about Fathom, it gets pushed into the Boom channel and we all celebrate it. That feels nice. We also have an anti-boom channel, right? For the very rare time that somebody says something negative about Fathom, we push it into the anti-boom channel.

Those are all signals, right? They can then be pumped back into our strategy for the rest of our customer content, our customer education, our education ecosystem. And that's the activate, right? That's where you really wanna get those things moving around.

Sorry folks, this is gonna fall right off of me. Give me a second here. (chuckles) Okay. Not quite.

All right, let's move on to metrics that matter. So, you know, we've talked about how we're going to align. We've talked about how we're gonna measure things, decrease the time to value. But if you can't tie education to revenue, you really are measuring the wrong things.

So most education metrics are kind of polite, right? We've talked about this a little bit before. Course completion, time spent, quiz scores, certifications. I did measure all of that before.

And I think I still will in some way, shape or form. But that's not the be all, end all. What you wanna do is be able to draw a straight line through here, right? If education changes the behavior that leads to a measurable outcome, then you're going to have a direct impact on revenue, right?

Did feature adoption increase? Did time to value decrease? Did retention improve? Did expansion revenue grow?

That's the scorecard. Education driving behavior changes, measurable outcome, and then revenue. If you can do that, you don't have an education program anymore, you really do have a growth engine. So, AI onboarding, right?

The terrifying AI onboarding. These are the tools, right? These are some of the tools I've come across. Funny enough, Quivley is here in the building with us.

I had checked their logo in here with their okay before they knew they were coming, so it's even better. But let me talk through a couple of these, and if you wanna go chat with them afterwards, I highly suggest you do. So, Kulu, also known as HeyKulu, is an AI onboarding agent for SaaS that delivers like one-to-one personalization. Where I would see this fitting in my book of business is, I have scale, I can't have my scale CSMs talk to 3,000 of their accounts, right?

It's not humanly possible. And if they did, they wouldn't be driving change and those accounts are expanding, they would just be answering tickets. So, this acts as that sort of individual, AI-driven onboarding assistant CSM for those types of accounts. Quivley doesn't necessarily sit in the customer education realm, specifically, but it's sort of your data, it's where everything gets pumped into one, and then you really learn about, where's my expansion opportunities?

Where am I losing revenue? Where is a churn risk? And so, it's that one place that's gonna help you activate based on the data. Saltfish have talked about, obviously, it's an avatar-based in-app onboarding system.

The team there is excellent, innovating really, really quickly, really easy to use. When I came here, I had to sort of build the training myself. I joked that I hadn't put my fingers on a keyboard for a really long time, but even someone like me, who has not built training for a very long time, could put things out that obviously had a measurable impact, really, really easy to use. I would highly suggest trying them out.

Chameleon is another tool. If you haven't heard of them, definitely worth checking out another in-app tool. It guides you through the things that you can do. It will also help you learn where customers are falling off in the product, and it's static, so it'll change, too, as you need it to, with the needs of the customer.

So, those are just a handful of tools. There's so many, even while I'm here, I'm so excited to learn about all these things, but these are just a handful that I've come across. So, I did wanna touch on this hot terminology, the education ecosystem. I know everyone's saying it, and I totally agree with it.

When I got hired at Fathom, I did joke that I would never build another academy. No more certifications, no more LMSs, no more, none of this, and then here we are today. So, I think what had happened was I thought we could fully get away from that. I really thought that it was time that we didn't need LMSs anymore, we didn't need that type of training, and I was wrong.

I think that what you need to do, and this is my opinion, is offer training and content and education in a multitude of ways, because everyone learns differently, right? I'm the type of person, I'm a new chicken mom, when I'm learning something about my chickens, I go to YouTube, right? I don't necessarily want to learn why you became a chicken parent, or what breed of chickens you have. When I fix something in my house, I try and be a DIYer, I'll go to YouTube.

Hey, my toilet is leaking all over the floor, what do I do? Do I necessarily want to learn why that person became a plumber 20 years ago? Well, my toilet is leaking on the floor? Definitely not.

I want to learn what I need to learn in that moment. And I think this ecosystem offers that to people. So, I hired somebody who is a brilliant, and she's building out this strategy for our education ecosystem. And why I really like what she's doing is that she's saying that there's multiple ways to learn, but everyone has its own unique goal.

So, our knowledge base becomes where you go for the source of truth. Answer a question, right? That's your documentation. Our academy, hasn't launched yet, but it's coming.

Our academy is where you build your expertise, right? Adopt and grow. And then our community really drives growth, brand awareness, all of the good things that communities bring. And then we also have the in-app training as well.

So, I don't necessarily think that certifications in academies are for everyone, but I think the point here is offer as much as you can in multiple different ways, as well as learning while they're doing things so that people can go back. So, I just want to sort of drive home the fact that the most important question isn't what should you be teaching in the first place. It's what is the context? What is the behavior that you're trying to change?

What do you want people to be doing in your platform or in your app or in your product that they're not doing currently? Not necessarily, what's the more content that we can build, right? Again, so now we're back in the library and then I back up a dump truck and dump a whole bunch more books at you. Did you find the answer with that dump truck of books?

Do you now know how to answer that question about the earliest recorded joke in history because I just bought more books in? Of course not, right? That's not gonna help you. You're just gonna be more angry because there's more content that you don't know how to sift through.

If the input is wrong, even the most personalized experience is just scaling the wrong thing faster. So instead of guessing what onboarding should look like, we're starting to know these things, right? We're starting to have tools that bubble data to the top. If you had asked me we would be there three years ago, I would have been like, that sounds like a dream because we just didn't have that data before.

The fact that our tools now are telling us exactly where our customers are dropping off means we can make better decisions. We can make decisions at the right moment for the context that that customer needs instead of scaling the wrong thing faster. So the future really is insight plus delivery when it comes to stuff like this. And I just, again, every customer conversation really is trying to tell you something.

It's how you gather that information and bring it back to the right people, right? I know your product team is busy. I know your sales team is busy. I know your support function is busy, but how can you gather those themes and make sure that you're driving the right things?

The key insight, when do you need to hone in, is where customers are getting stuck, what they don't understand, and what's blocking value for your customer. What's their why and what's blocking the value? Building and offering a scalable customer education doesn't just support growth. It really is a growth engine that you can truly measure.

So thank you very much. I'm happy to answer any questions. (audience applauding) Thank you, thank you, thank you. All right, time for some questions.

Yeah. Perfect, the first one is, how are you advertising promoting your daily webinars to get that kind of demand? Yeah, that's great. So all of our support agents, both actual agents and AI agents, the first response has it in their footer, so they get that.

Our welcome email that's automated to all of our new customers has it in there. In the product, when you first sign up, there's sort of three options in the product. One is that you go through a demo in the product, and then the other is the webinars that they can sign up for. And then we do do some media pushes, but the biggest one is probably our support ticket.

If we can respond with that first, people tend to click on that and log in. Okay, amazing. How do you think you approach education differently, being inside more of an AI native company versus inside more of a legacy SaaS company? I think you asked the second one.

(laughs) Sorry, there's a bit of delay, but that's okay. Was it the how do you think the approach to education? Yeah, how do you think you approach education differently, being inside more of an AI native company? Yeah, yeah, that's a great question.

It's a lot more fun right now because I get to trial and error a lot of things that I didn't before. So there's lots of good things about big companies, but there's lots of red tape. One thing about being at a smaller company right now is that I can test bed a lot of things. And if there's a failure and we're sort of failing forward through it, it's lower risk than when you're at a much larger organization.

I wouldn't say that that should stop you from trying new things. One of the things that we're doing a lot now is really leaning into all of the AI and all of the data that we have internally. It's funny actually, I messaged the head of my education program now and said, "How are we using Fathom to nudge us to build new content fully automated internally?" And she's like, "We're on it. We're already working on it." So how are we using Claude to do that?

How are we nudging ourselves? One of the things that my colleague built out was using Claude to nudge our teams to be prepared for calls. It's these experiments that we're running. I get mad at Claude five times a day, either because I time it out or because I've done something stupid that breaks it and it doesn't work the way I want it to.

But having that curiosity to go in and sort of break things has been much, much, much different than it was when I was at a larger organization. Great, thank you. How did you identify which customer behaviors to target first with education? I don't know if it's where you're standing, but anyways, it's okay.

I think it's the second one. Oh, it keeps on, as per the likes, it keeps on changing the order of the questions. No, I can't hear your questions. It's okay, it's not a big deal, it's fine.

The right mic. How do I identify which customer behaviors to target first with education? I'd like to say it's not like a thumb lick in the air, but we're still a little bit there. Again, so we're not fully optimized.

We still are a little bit in the maturing phase or even in the learning phase. But we do have a data team that is building out data and it's helping us look at high churn risk, high expansion targets, where people aren't using the tool. So we're able to go in and ask, we just rolled out a new portion of our tool, who's not using it? Within my book of business, within someone else's book of business.

And then we can target them. So one of the things we just recently did was we took a look at customers who had integrated their HubSpot with Fathom, but who hadn't yet turned on the full integration. And we said, well, there's an issue there, right? Clearly they wanted this, what stopped them, right?

And then we targeted them with an email. And in that email, we did two things. We offered up another webinar, a totally different webinar, and we offered links for them to book a call with our team. We saw huge success with that, like a 60% success, where either they booked calls with us.

The webinar wasn't usually widely attended, but we did see a lot of expansion. So people got on the phone and said, or on the call, the Zoom, and said, oh, I didn't know you guys did that. And then ended up expanding as a result of it. Okay, thank you.

Okay, how do you decide when content should live in the Academy, in-app community, or webinar format? Yeah, so again, so going back to those goals, right? Academy really should be, I'm building, right? I'm going there to continue to expand my knowledge about the product.

I'm going there because I have a basic knowledge and I'm growing that. It's not necessarily how to fix my pipe when my toilet's leaking, right? That is your knowledge base. That's where you're gonna go for that type of source of truth.

Community really should be community-led, right? The more we hear here and the more that I'm seeing, like it really should be what is happening? What do the people want? What are they talking about, right?

And let them sort of guide that. Are we gonna nudge stuff on there? Of course we are, but it's probably gonna be things that are interesting to our biggest power users, our advocates of Fathom. So if they're talking about something new, whether they like it or not, that's the type of thing we're going to lean into.

Webinar format is a test. Like I said, we rolled out the one for HubSpot. Wasn't really well attended. I don't know why.

We're still sort of looking into that. Low hanging fruit, it's a pretty easy win, right? If you have thousands and thousands of users like we do, offering something that almost everyone needs to take or wants to take is gonna be something that's usually pretty well attended in a webinar format. Amazing, thank you.

Our last question. Do you partner with product to define adoption goals to track success of the tactics taken by the CX, education tactics that were provided? Yes and no. So again, our organization is still very small when it comes to these types of things.

So we partner across the organization for almost everything that we do, right? That's not to say that when I'm making a decision, I have to hit the okay from that team, but we do talk about these types of adoption goals. I don't think they're as in the weeds with it. Again, being in success and owning customer education, some of those adoption things bubble up a lot more than it potentially they would hear in the product organization.

So I think that because we're small, because we're agile and we have really like lots and lots of meetings together anyways about building out in that product education, I guess that's it. Oh, we're back. We're having those conversations anyways. So I think we might get there where they're driving that or we're driving that, but right now it's just these open conversations about we're all trudging ahead to do the best thing for the product and the company and our customers.

Perfect, thank you so much. And thank you all for joining today's session. We really appreciate you all taking the time. Huge thanks to your speaker for sharing their insights and to all of you all for great questions and participation.

Enjoy your time at Pelt. Thank you.